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Game Log Session 4

Page history last edited by Ariel Alian 7 years, 6 months ago

Meridian’s Reflections – April 7th, 2015

 

I have stepped in to once again provide the status report for our small group's activities as the Spring Seneschal described my companion’s contributions as "an enthusiastic and one assumes drunken effort that was oddly improved by being perforated by a shotgun filled with explicatives".

 

I include passages in this record that involve times when I was not present, and in all honestly, not interested.  These are based on the best effort of those involved to provide details, context and semi-believable self-aggrandizement.

 

Firstly, who has been involved.  This particular segment of the record include myself, of course, and the following:

 

Rowan – One of Spring’s contributions, she continues to be the organizational focus of our cohort and reasonably effective at killing people.  As we will learn later, she should not attempt on the fly negotiations.

 

Persephone – Summer’s entry in the Real Housewives of Tartarus.

 

Mi-Ok – Winter’s representative, continues to function primarily as the bartender and, very occasionally, as an effective bulldozer.

 

Ava – Summer’s more recent contribution, she has a Newtonian approach to human interaction; which is to say she gets accelerated in a single direction and continues until impacted by a far larger object.

 

Solomon – Spring, the lawyer, more useful than you would initially think.

 

Jacob – Winter’s other representative, which leads one to believe the entire Court must largely consist of alcoholics and unsupervised children.

 

Catching things up – There was an artifact, tentatively called the Box of Judges, which pretty much everyone wanted.  We obtained it and gave it to the safe keeping of AER, a group that apparently was organized to bury things of concerning power in the foundations of large buildings.  That really was supposed to be it, back to our day jobs and social calendar.

 

Or not.

 

I had spent the last several weeks completing a portrait for Judy Davidson, the recent wife of the aging Randolf Davidson; largely to provide a believable backstory of happy married life for the lawyers when he abruptly passes on, when I was contacted by the Spring Seneschal.   There had, apparently, been a large explosion at a downtown construction site following a surprise NSA raid.  The Seneschal was unclear as to whom the NSA were raiding given the lack of any actual people at the location, or why terrorists would jihad an unoccupied cement mixer but requested we look into it.

 

Given AER is apparently run by a centuries old mummy who is very fixated on “bury it” as a global problem solution, I suspect he may have been right.  I contacted the rest of the cohort and we agreed to meet at Rowan’s office and discuss the matter in the Hedge hollow.

 

The Hedge Hollow – Yes, that’s the little nook we carved out as a place to hide some weeks back.  Apparently Jacob has been working on it and feeding it off the cohort’s collective paranoia.  It’s now the size of a warehouse, has steel reinforced doors and some sort of aura based security system protecting the sink.  On the plus side, the wine cellar has some interesting vintages, so there’s that.

 

Mi-Ok, Rowan and Ava are there first, Rowan and Ava by virtue of living there and Mi-Ok by virtue of long practice in escaping the rehab center Solom and I may, or may not, have had her committed to.  She was surprised to encounter a very small deer at the door to the clinic.  After verifying the deer was, probably, not a hallucination she engaged it in conversation and learned that it was looking for Ava and referred to itself as the Opener of Ways, which made its inability to manage the doorknob on the clinic door both ironic and delightful.  Ava was awakened and eventually delivered, at which point the Opener of Ways (henceforth referred to as Ow) noted that it had been sent by Leo, that Leo was fine, and that it would take Ava (and associated companions) anywhere they wanted to go other than Seattle.

 

Further conversation was largely uninteresting and Jacob took an attraction to the deer that points to a fine future in the furry community.  He was allowed to carry it about with a firm understanding to wash his hands afterwards.  Eventually Ava demanded that the deer return to Leo and provide more context on why it is important she leave Seattle.  The deer does so and Jacob learned the first of many lessons in the fleeting nature of love.

 

Persephone arrived somewhat late to the party as she awoke to find herself surrounded by rose petals in the shape of a chalk outline around her sleeping form, which is one of many reasons why forensic scientists shouldn’t be allowed to date.

 

Eventually the entire cohort made it to the site of the explosion and I was able to charm the general situation out of the police.  Adding our own context it appears AER was attempting to bury the “Box” in the building’s foundations, apparently on the theory that your very well-known single solution to all your problems will undoubtedly be more effective the 314th time you attempt it.  Unfortunately, it was not and they were raided as “potential terrorist” by one of the factions posing as Homeland Security, which continues to guard the site.  Taking various vantage point the cohort was able to verify that box was still at the site and that there were far too many guards on it to attempt a recapture in so public a circumstance.  Please remember this intelligent analysis of our ability to enter combat, as we will largely abandon this process later and it’s good to know that we at least know how.  The guards all wear the same suit and are fairly clearly the “Angels” from our earlier encounter but commanding human Homeland Security forces.

In probably unrelated related news Solomon found a desiccated human hand in a doorway while scouting the area.  Well done, I’m sure there’s some sort of scouting badge for that, congratulations.

During the investigation Ow returns and, working through the tantric gyrations of Jacob’s affections manages to communicate that we have been asked to leave Seattle to ensure the safety of Ava’s brother Diego, at least until the Threat is passed.  Threat in this case being largely undefined, but clearly capitalized. This makes no actual sense and disrupts an ongoing investigation however Ow is engagingly adorable and hard to say no to.  We finally compromise by deciding the majority of the group will go to Portland where it will be relatively easy to drive back, but Persephone and Mi-OK will remain behind.  Mi-Ok to keep an eye on things and Persephone because she apparently prefers to keep her animal experimentations monogamous for the time being.

 

Portland is, well, Portland.  We rent a car and do pet friendly brunch (Jacob refused to release the deer).  As reality television goes, this is not one of our better episodes.

 

Persephone returns to the houseboat l’amore to find a police officer asking about suspicious actives.   Given the actives in the houseboat alone left suspicious in the rear view while accelerating toward unnatural, the neighbor’s concern is understandable.  Persephone gives him Orpheus’s description as a potential nocturnal predator and they part company.  She spends the afternoon playing video games.

 

Ava, working on the presumption that fleeing the situation is best supported by immediately attempting to reintegrate, calls her contacts in AER and discovers that they did, indeed, attempt to bury the box and were interrupted by a rocket launcher.  Diego was wounded but will recover and Bengie’s husband is missing.  Their undead leader was apparently the primary target and is now a delightful puzzle game spread across three blocks of downtown.  We decide to go to Powells.

 

Mi-Ok has been watching the scene and drinking, during one of her more coherent moments a woman in her 50s dressed in business casual attempts to speak with her, referring to her as Margarete Jones, her name before being taken into the hedge.  Falling back on the unassailable wall of confusion that is a stereotypical non-English speaking Asian woman she is able to rebuff the woman’s overtures.  This was most likely a hallucination.  Unfortunately, Mi-Ok tends to not get much mention in these reports, primarily because an alcoholic coma is not literarily interesting.  So when something does occur, fictional or not, one feels compelled to mention it as a sort of participation award.

 

Meanwhile, the impromptu Portland tourism committee decided to investigate Powells bookstore and encounters my fetch, which flounces through the store like the hipster train wreck he is.  If there was ever an argument for avoiding store brand imitations, it would be him.  Making matters somewhat more interesting is the entrance of my naked hallucinatory version, who bee-lines to hipster version and commences an enthusiastic but tragic seduction.  This not only makes Powells far more interesting, it finally ends the “Is Merdian a low class streetwalker in his sleep” discussion.  After Rowan makes a well-intentioned but ultimately fruitless attempt to clothe my amorous doppelganger we exit before the police become involved.

 

It is possible that in the future when the universe sends me a surprise butler, I should not simply assume it agrees I am too attractive for manual labor and do some sort of investigation on Angie’s List.

 

Regrouping at a local gelato shop we receive a text that an unknown Changling has been seen at the site of the raid.  A red haired Hispanic man in his mid 20s, who is quickly identified as Ava’s long lost brother Diego.  We bring closure to this completely pointless side venture and drive back to Seattle.

 

Persephone awakened to 90s era seduction music and saw a strange figure playing a guitar on a neighboring rooftop.  She pursued the entity, finally cornering him on a rooftop where he named himself Orpheus and claimed they were true loves in a former life/hallucination/masterbational fantasy, threw a rose at her and shimmied down a drainpipe to freedom.  While marginally more romantic than Dimitri’s chewed squirrel tribute, it only goes to prove yet again that Persephone’s love life is best described as pages 6-14 of the Criminal Minds story bible.

 

Awakening Dimitri and making him aware of the most embarrassing love triangle imaginable she convinces him to scout the area and they find a desiccated female corpse that smells vaguely of Orpheus.  Persephone’s love life continues to deliver and now Sol has something to add to his desiccated body part collection.

 

Upon returning to Seattle we retrieve Mi-Ok.  Rowan has decided to chip her for tracking, listing her in the database as a horse.  The sitcom that is our life just writes itself.

 

Ava refuses to drop the subject of her brother, despite all attempts to staunch the verbal hemorrhage, and we decide contacting him might be worthwhile given his interest in the raid site.  Ava’s claims to the contrary, he proves to be easy to locate and we send Ava to meet him with the rest of the group staying back in case we need to shoot him (and, potentially, her).  He’s spying on the Homeland security building (where the raid group we assume took the box) from atop an autobody shop next door.  Ava and Diego exchange an increasingly less whispered dialog of short, declarative sentences; mostly consisting of “You are in Danger”, “No” and “Fuck you”.  It eventually comes out that he has been extorted to steal the box or someone will harm Ava, which given she only exited the hedge a few weeks ago gives a new record for smallest amount of time before you become a pawn for someone more important.

 

While this discussion continues in its Disney dialog glory, a caravan of black mini-vans passes on its way to the Homeland security offices.  Apparently one of the other factions became tired of waiting.  We leave Diego to his own devices and decide to follow the raiding party in, the vague plan being to take the box from the survivors.

 

Remember earlier when I mentioned the sudden loss of practical perspective?  This is where that starts.

 

We waited a bit for the screaming and gunfire to start and then headed in.  We already knew where the time travelling safe was (read the previous records, I’m not going over that again, it was ridiculous enough the first time).  We arrived to find it open with a functioning 1990’s tech office happily buzzing along on the other side, apparently completely OK with a large, stand along safe that occasionally disgorges multiple heavily armed people.  Clearly drugs were better in the 90s.

 

The Hollow men (apparently the SUV caravan was their idea) are right behind us and after barricading and defending the office for a time it’s clear we’re losing so we go through the safe and close it from the inside.  Most of the group continues into the technology office (to the aforementioned disregard of the current occupants) but Sol remains to guard the door to the safe.  As Solomon has no combat capabilities this is a largely symbolic gesture, but if felt plot appropriate.

 

Running down into the hallway with the door containing the box (again, read the previous records, given the gerbil like focus of the author they ended up being surprisingly accurate) we find it once again exactly where it was last time, so while our opponents do well in the brute force category, creativity is not their strong point.  Unfortunately, there are 12 guards between us and the room.  In what can only be assumed a momentary urge for violent suicide, Rowan seizes the initiative and attempts to fast talk them into leaving, leaving the guard dubious and me aghast.   After a brief moment of embarrassed silence on everyone’s part Rowan falls back on stabbing one of them, bringing us all back to familiar ground.

 

It should be noted for the record that we are not particularly good at combat.  It should also be noted that we are all perfectly well aware of this and yet we keep doing it.  Practice does not always make perfect; in some cases, it just makes debilitating wounds and a lot of running away.  Although less in my case as I had the good sense to surrender.

 

Well, sort of, I noted Rowan attempting to sneak into the room with the box and gathered the attention of the guards, negotiating the terms of my surrender with sufficient vigor to leave them far too distracted to note her cautious departure.

 

Jacob was in there somewhere but both sides had come to something of a quiet agreement that we were all just going to ignore the 12 year old child holding a baby deer in the middle of the firefight as it was clearly either a guild ridden hallucination or a PETA commercial and frankly no one wanted to deal with either.  Ava and Mi-Ok had managed to run away.  Apparently Mi-Ok can move at a truly surprising clip when properly motivated (e.g. life endangerment or an open bar).  They linked back up with Sol who had been preventing additional reinforcements by reverse hacking the safe door as quickly as the opposition could hack it.  Points to Solomon for finding a way to make his symbolic presence actually useful.

 

The office staff continues to ignore this entire process with impressive denial, perhaps they thought it was improvisational theatre.

 

Rowan managed to make it into the room and from there into the box.  Apparently it contains an ornate room with a Staff mounted on a pedestal (I’m not sure if Staff should be capitalized, but given all the trouble someone went to on the presentation it seems only polite).  She investigated it a bit but made little headway, which is understandable given her primary skillset is torture and eating things.

 

Ave, Rowan and Solomon had meanwhile opened the safe long enough to allow Diego through.  He was, understandably, less than thrilled to discover that the life endangering mission he undertook to protect his sister had been rendered largely moot by her getting there first and engaging in vigorous melee.  They join forces and return downstairs just as I have completed the main portion of the surrender document and started on the sub-clauses and addendums.  Diego burns them all to death which I appreciate but really does make nearly an hour of solid documentation rather moot.  Unfortunately there are opposition reinforcements on their way down (having made it through the safe once Solomon’s reverse hacking was no longer an impediment).

 

Having little in the way of options we decide to all gather inside the box and depend on Mi-Ok and her rather unnatural speed to barrel through the guards, back through the safe and out the other side.  Given that no one’s mission plan had, apparently, prepared them for a small Asian woman running through them at 40 mph with a gold puzzle box the plan is bizarrely successful and Mi-Ok makes it to the other side and safely into the hedge where we eventually disembark inside the Hedge Hollow.

 

By the time you receive this we may actually have figured out what to do with the damn thing.

 

Comments (1)

bucketmouse said

at 9:54 am on Sep 17, 2016

He, going to Portland let us confirm Meridian, Meridian's Fetch, and Naked Street walker Meridian all in the same place at the same time. That put at least half of our theories about it to rest. Totally worth it.

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